Free Qualified Traffic For Your Site

This past Monday one of my clients held a press conference announcing their annual event. My big lesson from the announcement revolved around the importance of referral traffic. Any time another web site links to your web site and sends you traffic, it’s considered referral traffic. Referral traffic doesn't cost you any money to generate. Another nice part about referral traffic is that it’s usually highly qualified traffic. If people are at all curious about your event, they’ll click on the referring link. Below is an easy to implement suggestion to get free referral traffic for your event web site. It works best when done in conjunction with a press conference or press release for your event. Focus on getting referral links from local news outlets. Local news web sites have higher traffic rates. If you can get national coverage, even better!

Compare and ContrastHere is a quick comparison of the traffic to the web site supporting my client’s event. In 2007, 85 visitors went to the event web site within 24 hours of the announcement. There were few referring links back to the web site in 2007. After the press conference on Monday, 1,238 visitors (1,346 visits) went to the web site within 24 hours. That’s a 1356% increase in traffic. 84% of the 1,238 visitors came as a result of referring traffic. One of the local news web sites accounted for almost 50% of all the traffic in the first 24 hours. In addition, over 400 people signed up to mailing list supporting the event within 72 hours. The last time we tried to collect email addresses it took 4 months to get 400 people on the mailing list.

The Media ForgetsJust because you include a web address in your media kit or press release doesn’t mean the media will automatically include it with their stories. It’s very easy for a writer on deadline to forget something as simple as your web site address. Don’t take it personally. Whenever the media covers your event, you want them to include your web address. It’s free publicity that drives qualified traffic to your web site.

What You Can DoThe following suggestion might take 15 minutes to an hour of your time, but it is well worth the investment. Call up your local media outlets (television, radio, & newspaper). Concentrate your efforts on news outlets that have dedicated web sites. When calling, you want to ask for someone at the news desk. Try to find out who might be covering the story on your event. When you find the right person, kindly request that they include your web address with any stories they’re running. By doing so you’ll drive qualified traffic to your web site.

Comments

You have very well illustrated the importance of referral traffic with an example.

When I didn't have backlinks and checked my Google Analytics for almost a year for my blog, I found that search engines sent more traffic than Anything so the pie char was similar to yours but the referral and search engines got swapped.

Now as I intensified my blogging activity and after doing some study on website traffic, I started writing comments on others' blogs. That started driving me huge traffic regularly. This traffic is highest for three to four of writing the comments on various blogs. So my pie chart now looks like yours, traffic mostly coming from referral websites.

To get organic traffic (search engines) we need to have lot of content. Otherwise get referral traffic with backlinks. This is free and fun to watch as it does not take much time!